The background: although the area of music he operates in couldn't be more different, Kwes is one of those backroom types like Emeli Sandé who, having spent time working on music for others, is now stepping out of the shadows to become a solo artist. It's to his credit that he's decided to venture out from behind the mixing desk or whatever it is producers use these days, because he could have quite easily carried on being the junior Brian Eno of experimental UK pop, the studio magician and alchemist, given how impressive his CV is. It was he who provided the "Kwes" bit of 2009's Kwesachu Mixtape Vol 1 collaboration, the other half being fellow exponent of avant-pop odyshapes , Micachu. He has produced or remixed the xx, Hot Chip's Joe Goddard, Zero 7, the hard-to-classify DELS, even Damon Albarn's Monkey opera, and most recently he produced Speech Debelle's second album, Freedom of Speech. He's also been in a number of bands, from the obscure Bono Must Die to almost-weres Ebony Bones, who peaked when they appeared in this column in 2008. He even toured with 90s techno dons Leftfield, playing to 20,000 people a night, and spent July 2011 visiting the Democratic Republic of Congo with Albarn, Dan the Automator and Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, where they recorded an album with Congolese musicians.

And now the 24-year-old has fulfilled a childhood ambition by signing to Warp and releasing an EP of off-kilter pop of the sort one imagines he's been wanting to make all his life, ever since the solipsist daydreamer sat glued to Top of the Pops watching Prince and Pet Shop Boys, fiddling with his toy synths and undertaking early forays into overdubbing on basic tape recorders. That EP, Meantime, isn't his first – there have been a couple of releases on XL offshoots that essayed a form of idiosyncratic electronica - record but is the first to truly represent what Kwes is about, and evince his influences: he cites as favourites Soft Machine and Robert Wyatt, and you can hear it in the itchy textures and rhythms, and the mumbled, soft whimsical tones (which also bear shades of Albarn). And there's a touch of Todd Rundgren, the role model for all do-it-all studio whizzkids since the 70s, as well as the Neptunes and the-Dream.

"I think it's my first real attempt at making a pop record – it's controlled chaos," says Kwes, attempting to capture the rough, sketchy feel of the tracks, all of which are about love and his experiences growing up and only one of which was directly inspired by Brian Wilson's Vegetables. It's as far from cold synth music as you can get – there's a warmth to it, a playfulness and forlorn exuberance that makes it sound as human as any acoustic singer-songwriter record. It opens with Klee, which has the vividness and sparkle of the Swiss colour theorist's paintings. Bashful is as quintessentially English and quirky as XTC, an XTC with someone young and adventurous at the controls – Kwes, perhaps. Honey is original and unpredictable, with fantastic production featuring a meticulous attention to detail with its found sounds and keyboard tricks, whirrs, clicks and boings. Kwes loves prog at its most barmy: this is what a latterday Gong might be like. EP closer Igoyh is seven minutes of mayhem and merry madness, like a bunch of kids running riot in a junkshop. And yet somewhere, amid the xylophone riffs, loops of typewriter keys being clacked, guitar fuzz and deodorant cans spraying, there is a sublime R&B pop song. Kwes may fear being the focal point – "Me singing, in the centre, that's really alien to me," he has said – but he makes as much sense as a frontman as he does a technician. What you might call a wizard, a true star .